Another article on my favorite idee fixe, the Math Regents, from today's Times. Here's my favorite bit:

Asked why the Education Department gave a test when it expected the average score to be so low, Alan Ray, a department spokesman, said, "The purpose of the test is to measure whether students meet the standards, not to make sure that a certain number of students pass or fail."

I'm not quite sure what this means, except to assume that the Ed. Dept. has some sort of Platonic conception of what standards are. But notice the logic. This test isn't diagnostic: that would make sense--the Powers That Be could find out what weaknesses there are and the teachers could then work to correct those weaknesses. No, this test is an exit exam to see whether students have mastered the material. And yet there seems to be no agreement on what material is to be covered: the rest of the article notes that the test contained no trigonometry problems, but it did have several problems on the Pythagorean theorem, which might have affected some students who hadn't studied the Pythagorean theorem. Are these elusive standards some sort of secret? Why don't the test takers and their teachers know what is to be covered on the test? It's given me a certain grudging appreciation for the SAT: at least students know exactly what they're being tested on (which is essentially nothing, of course).